Friday, 14 March 2014

Caffeine and Memory

I have a
great fondness for my morning cup of coffee.I'm pretty happy about my second morning cup of coffee, too.Although my children like to taunt me about
having an addiction, they also know better than to bother me before my first cup of joe
in the morning.And occasionally I
indulge in an afternoon pick-me-up, yet another steaming mug.Coffee wakes me up, gets me going, makes me
alert and creative.Once, in a foolish
fit of well-meaning, I gave up coffee for a year.It was the most dull, flat, uninspired year
of my life.I’ll keep the coffee,
thanks.

And so it
always pleases me to read about positive effects of caffeine.The February 2014 issue of Nature
Neuroscience includes an article showing that caffeine increases memory
consolidation.Caffeine has been shown
in the past to increase alertness and attention, but a proven role in memory in
humans has been lacking.

This recent study, authored by Borota et al. out of Johns Hopkins University, had subjects study pictures of objects, asking
them to consider whether each one would be used indoors or outdoors.Afterwards, they were either given 200 mg of
caffeine, or a placebo.The next day,
the people came back to the lab and were shown another series of pictures.Some pictures were the same ones they had
seen the previous day, some were completely new, and some were “lure” pictures,
similar to those seen on the previous day, but not identical.The subjects had to try to remember what they
had seen the previous day, and say whether each picture was new, old or
similar.The researchers found that
people were pretty good at distinguishing new from old pictures, but the tricky
part of the task was the lure pictures.People who had taken the caffeine pills were better at recognizing these
pictures as similar but not the same as those they had previously seen.

Memory
processes go through several stages.The
first is encoding, when we get new
information and store it in our brain, laying down a memory trace.The next step is consolidation, in which memories become resistant to interference
from competing memories, and become strengthened.In a research setting, this is usually seen as
better performance on a memory task.Some consolidation of memories can occur while we’re awake, but there is
a large body of evidence showing that memory consolidation during sleep is
critical for strengthening memories.The
last memory process used by the subjects in this research study is memory retrieval, where memories are pulled out
for use in a memory task.

Because in
this study the caffeine was administered after the subjects had studied the
pictures for the first time, we cannot tell anything about the effect of
caffeine on memory encoding (although other studies have not shown any real
effect).And saliva tests showed that
there was no residual caffeine in the subjects’ systems at the time of memory
testing, so this study doesn’t implicate caffeine in memory retrieval
either.This study shows that caffeine
boosts memory consolidation.Excellent!I think I’ll go and make myself another cup.

2 comments:

I find it somewhat ironic that most memory consolidation occurs while asleep, but that caffeine (a stimulant that keeps us awake) also helps with memory consolidation. I guess it provides reassurance to people who fight sleep deprivation with caffeine that they aren't totally missing out on memory consolidation. (Of course, I'll confess to being bitter because I have a caffeine intolerance and am dependent on sleep alone for both my alertness and, apparently, my memory consolidation :P)

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.